go_exchange | Happy Holidays, ngk_is

Title: The Kingdoms of the World

Author: Secret!

Summary: Jesus is only an odd, sarcastic little boy when the demon Crawley meets him and takes him on a field trip to the ends of the world.

Rating: G

A/N: There’s a bit of historical trivia in here, a bit of old gospels and Jewish history and a lot of happy anachronisms. I really enjoyed making this gift and I hope you enjoy my little take on this idea!

"You know, you really didn't have to do that..."

Crawley's voice was soft, amused. With the most reluctant brush of reproach.

The small child looked up at Crawley. The demon estimated him to be, oh, four maybe five? Crawley squatted down to him, pushing his black woven headdress aside to frame his unfairly (for the climate) luscious red curls. "Not like the other kid meant it, eh?"

Jesus puckered his lips in a sideways frown. "But he killed my pigeons," he said simply.

"But they weren't... real birds were they? I mean, not from eggs and that." Crawley leaned his forearms on his knees, tilting his head just so to catch the young Galilean's dusty brown eyes. "Just clay straight through."

Jesus stared at him a minute, taken aback (was it the pupils again? Bugger, he'd need to do something about that). "Well, they'd have been real," the boy said, more as a declaration, an idea forming in his head. "Eventually. Everything comes from the clay and goes back into it. The ground has alive birds in it as much as it has you and I."

Crawley raised a brow. So they weren't wrong about this kid. People talked in a small town like Nazareth, and Crawley had (for the last couple weeks) joined a cozy knitting circle for women that didn't quite fit in with the expectations of the local moral clime. Like the young moms who didn't have a man or the young women who weren't moms (...or the demon considering making this female thing more permanent). They were a bonded lot, the women, and even when Mary settled with a partner, she kept up with the group and they'd shared and laughed and loved.

Nowadays they'd often talk about Jesus. Quite simply, he was a right pain in the arse, mostly to his adoptive dad, who found him obstinate and inappropriately political (snide remarks about both Herod and Caiaphas did not go well over Passover dinner). Apparently, there was talk that Mary had found the child, that he wasn't Jewish enough to be blood. Maybe he was born to some upstart Roman who couldn't abide a child during Saturnalia. Maybe he was from radical Greece (which would explain some of the far out gab that came out of his mouth).

Regardless, the intrigue was enough to flag the attention of home office. They'd been on the lookout for humans who might create trouble topside, and Rome and its thinly-spread collection of oppressed ethnic groups were a hotbed waiting to flame. People needed hope, and Abraham's people were no exception. There were wild speculations in both Heaven and Hell on the child's prophetic potential. Perhaps Heaven had dabbled personally this time. (One of Hell's field agents had spotted Gabriel hanging about the Sea of Galilee, and that was never a good, or, well, bad sign. Something was clearly up.)

The Dark Council voted to inspect the child and had sent their best agent (Crawley) to investigate the latest trending topic in contemporary prophecy. To be sure, there'd been several claims on the title Son of Man over the centuries. That cheeky go-getter Enoch was for the longest time the be-all end-all of the Chosen Ones, but that was over a thousand years ago. He had in all likelihood ascended to Yahweh's second-in-command at this point (the story changed with each telling, as stories do, but drunken shepherds and bedtime storytellers were keen on getting Enoch somewhere interesting before his legend fell out of favor).

Fast forward several dozen generations and everyone was itching for a new savior much closer to home (what with politics as it was) and everyone loved an underdog. It was high time for a new Messiah.

Crawley had found the kid charming. Of course in this case, charming included a streak for anger a mile wide and sarcasm that would burn the fur off a wild badger. The kid didn't take fools lightly, and he found a ripe lot of fools to entertain him. Joseph was not amused by the lack of ability to hold any paternal authority over Jesus, and he'd several times attempted to enroll the boy in the town's religious programs, to try to get him to work off some of that rebellious energy (this was long before after school sports, of course, and religion was the accepted hobby for a child from ages two and up, accompanied of course by a Y-chromosome adult).

But each time Jesus left for the temple, he returned with a stern warning and several exasperated (and often offended) scholars, each of whom said they couldn't understand the child and he certainly didn't want to understand them. In fact, he seemed to take a special pleasure in getting on their bad side. He refused to learn his letters (even if, in practice, he seemed to read just fine). The final straw was a showdown with a hapless first-day sub regarding (ostensibly) the alphabet: "Since you do not know the nature of alpha," Jesus had told him, "how will you teach me beta?"

Crawley was impressed.

But right now, Jesus looked mournfully pissed, caught up in the loss of his pigeons. Or, just maybe, regretting the hilarious smiting he gave the purported destroyer of his clay sculptures (the other kid would think there were ants up his robe for about a week).

Crawley had seen that kind of disturbed energy before. The bright sense of curiosity and exploration snuffed shut by unimaginative authority figures who thought they knew what was best for you. That dogged sense that there was something huge everyone was missing. People pretending they could force you to see the world just as black and white as they did. It could dampen the most spirited flames. Could fall the most optimistic of angels.

Crawley sighed in one long, drawn-out breath. "Yes, you're right, of course. About the clay birds. I apologize."

A fiendish glimmer twinkled in Jesus' deep, earthen eyes. "You're not like them, are you?"

"Them?"

"My parents. My friends." He reached out his little hand for Crawley's. "Walk with me?"

Crawley smiled. He took the little boy's hand and rose. The child was silent for a minute as they walked out of the packed earth of the town center and the dust of the rough-hewn habitations, and made for the wide fields beyond where the hills rose up into a bright cerulean sky. They walked past the light yellow-green of terraced fields and the flocks of sheep and goats, crested the hill to a nestled spot under the shade of a gnarly olive tree. The tree leaned out of the side of a vertical surface of rock, rising from the hillside, shielding the corner from Nazareth and providing a vista towards the larger population in Tzipori to the west, far off and hazy like a dream in the blazing sun. A line of vineyards and olives and stone walkways could be seen crisscrossing the landscape far away, the city modernized in a way Jesus' dead-end hometown hadn't been. But other than that, it was wide open land, bright sandy shores and rock and groves of pale leaves and golden grass for as far as the eye could see. It was a beautiful place, lonely and forgotten.

"I've been wondering," Jesus said suddenly.

"Always a good thing." Crawley grinned, finding a ledge-like jut of rock to lean his skinny frame against.

Jesus crawled to the top of the ledge near the tree, hauled himself over to sit on the cliffside cut of the rock just above Crawley. He hung his legs down and looked at Crawley. "I was wondering." His voice grew quiet. "If it all means anything."

Crawley let out a soft laugh, sighed and looked up at the boy, amused by how much he sensed they were on the same page about this. The boy wasn't talking about the bad looks he'd get at school or the disappointed scowl of his dad. More like... all those things and more. And Crawley was all for talking about the big ideas, but doing it with someone who wasn't his longtime sparring mate and not-quite-fallen angel wasn't his usual forte. He often left it up to people to do the actual philosophizing, lest they be unduly influenced by his own optimistic brand of fatalism. "Are you quite sure I'm qualified to answer that for you?"

Jesus gave him a look. "You know things. You're a demon," he said, proud of himself. "From Lilith, Adam's first wife."

Crawley shook his head. "Demon, yes. Not from Lilith. She was nice, though. Wish more folks remembered that."

Jesus, nonplussed, cocked his head. "Well?"

Crawley looked out at the fields and sky around them, squinted in the brightness, thought of the life he had in the darkness of the universe, when he put lights in the empty vastness of nothing and watched as humans named the order of stars as they seemed from the vantage point of a pale blue dot in the middle of nothing, as people fell in love to the nuclear forges of hydrogen and helium in the sky, as their hearts were bolstered by the beauty of things they could never touch and never know.

"There are kingdoms in the sea," Crawley said, looking up into the blue of the sky. "Kingdoms in pools of water as vast and as endless as the night. Like you said, the sand's got life in it––the bones of all the dead from every generation. And they grow on this massive dead thing at the bottom of the ocean, these tiny creatures in the sea. And they grow into towers and trees on the seabed, vast and bright and bigger than any forest you know, except they're every color you can imagine. Blue, orange, pink, yellow, in every shape and size, a city across the surface of the ocean... Can you see it?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I think I can."

"Right. Ok, see that? The round one floating?" Crawley pointed up to the vista spread out before them. It was at once both the heart of a coral reef in the clearest, untouched sea, and also merely the tangible truth of Crawley's memory and imagination. Crawley's ability to influence localized time and willing minds was much more finessed in these early days. They walked within it as in a dream.

"That's a turtle. And that... that's a hundred fish moving in time to the waves." The fishy swarm ballooned and enveloped them in a silken rush of little fins and bouncy bodies. "Ticklish, eh? And that sound? It's the voice of one of the largest animals in creation." He could almost feel the vibrating throat of the massive thing, all ridges and barnacles. As it came closer, the song became more like a jet engine vocalizing in some hypnotic stranglehold over his brain. Crawley clapped his palms over his ears. "Blimey!"

"Why is he sad?"

"I don't know," Crawley shouted. "He might not be sad. Just sounds it."

"But you know what happens, don't you."

Crawley pulled his hands away from his ears as the heavy, impossible moan of the humpback ebbed away from them. Jesus was staring at the sea with wide open eyes, ears uncovered, taking in every painful decibel of that sorrowful roar, the young boy's eyes alive with the color of the most vibrant field that no human for the next thousand years would see.

"I know some things, yeah." (Part demonic privilege, of course, part peeking at documents above his clearance level.)

The child was still gazing at the glimmering schools of fish, beguiled by the light that fell in dapples over the endless shapes of iridescent color. "You know it won't last?"

"Mm. Nothing lasts, not forever." Crawley watched as the whale drifted into the hazy blue of the deep, enveloped in a growing darkness as the demon's mind drifted across the eras, to future-memory and a woefully keen understanding of how humans worked.

"This forest in the sea... it won't be here, in a few hundred generations. There are other kingdoms, like the Romans. But it won't be them, they'd be gone and just a story by then. But other kingdoms. Across the world, and all this color, this life that came out of the carcass of dead things from ages ago. These kingdoms would starve it out, kill it slowly until it was a desert here. A colorless dry thing in the ocean." Crawley tensed, felt a shudder of regret and anger color the scene before them. Humans were so ingenious and so infernally stupid, a species bent on taking more than it gave in its mad rush to be god.

"They look so strange."

Jesus' voice broke Crawley's reflection, and he looked at the landscape before him. Humans, some two thousand years from now, milling through a twentieth-century city––skyscrapers, asphalt, a hazy skyline. The black tar they walked on covered the whole of the earth it seemed, encasing the land in a hard cocoon. Deep siphons piped the black blood of forests from deep in the grave of the earth, pumped it out and refined it to a slick oil, as white smoke filled the sky with the excrement of a kingdom that believed itself the highest achievement of history.

"They're still people though, like your folks." Crawley said. It was a fundamental truth of his beliefs, the thing that made it all make sense. They'd do things that were blindingly brilliant, downright genius and damnably humane, and a second later, they'd be condemning entire species to extinction by way of the high life. "Look at the way they've shaped metal into those wheeled thingies. Motorcars, they call them. Motorcars. They don't use donkeys much by then."

But Jesus was still trying to figure out the people. "They're sad, aren't they," he mused.

Pedestrian traffic rushed past them in slow, ebbing waves, a human tide coming in and out with the turning of the red-orange-green light posted to a metal pole.

"I think in some fundamental way, we all are," Crawley mused, watched as on a city corner a tiny baby made nonsense words in the arms of a young teenage boy, as two wrinkled elderly women embraced at a bus stop with a laughter that belied their years.

The demon shook his head, clearing his thoughts, his vision, and his mind fell back to the stars of his early days, the furnaces of blazing light that shone lonely and silent in the vacuum of the deep. And the two of them stood there and listened to the song of the spiral of stars that whirled around the tiny sun that warmed the tiny planet where every human being who ever lived had died. They watched as worlds coalesced around dust and rock, as the surface of earths lightyears away burned with incalculable heat, as stars exploded in spectacular slow motion, their colorless guts spilling stop-motion into the silent black.

Crawley had been there when the world was new and there had been no rules to break. He was there when the only parent he knew refused to explain why he wasn't worthy of love. And he would be here until this world would reinvent itself a million times over, and the fresh elements of the first creation would be old and tired and drift back to cosmic dust.

Crawley felt the weight of time on him then, the thin stretch of his psyche as he reached so far into that delicate space between the now and then. "Don't think we'd be here if our lot were fundamentally hopeless, though. None of us remember what it felt like to be born, not even me. We're probably all chasing that feeling of being alive, yeah? That first time your undeveloped brain looked out on this barmy world and thought, that's bloody brilliant."

The serpent of the Garden looked to the side, at the child who would become somehow more than human, the invented and reinvented symbol of so many beliefs and so many wars and so much wrong and so much right.

The tan-skinned, curly-haired boy with thin legs and calloused palms didn't fight the tears in his eyes, let them fall as he watched the twin dance of Alpha Centauri and the blinding razor-light of Saturn's rings, as the Earth collapsed into heat and into ice over the course of a hundred million years. How everyone died and yet everything lived, and how what started as formless nothing and untouchable energy burst into reality in a crash of light that gave matter its first breath, that sped the universe across the vacant nothing in less than the smallest fraction of the blink of the eye.

There was light, She said, and it was good.

The small child turned to the being that was not quite a man, now winged and shining beside him (Crawley had quite forgot himself in the ecstasy of the moment). The corner of the boy's lips went up and he whispered, as if sharing a secret, "Hakarat Hatov."*

Crawley smiled. "Pretty much."

"I'd like to go home now."

"Yeah." The demon put his wings away. "Can do. Take my hand."

*הַכָּרַת הַטּוֹב, or "recognizing the good," a fundamental Jewish concept of being grateful for the good in one's life, even in the midst of darkness and sorrow.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

breathtaking. very wow.
can't wait to find out who wrote it.

I did enjoy this take, particularly the way your wrote Jesus, which was wonderful.

Oops, was so busy getting excited that forgot to say how much I loved it!!
This take is so interesting, kid Jesus already knows he is different and looking for answers, and Crowley will never shy away from those.
The world-building was amazing, could almost see the sights they were seeing.
Can't wait to find out who wrote it, and screm again :)

Ooooh, Jesus talking about the clay pigeons is so interesting! I love how the interactions with him and Crowley mirror later ones with Warlock and Nanny Ashtoreth
“optimistic brand of fatalism” this is Crowley exactly XD
“Crawley's ability to influence localized time and willing minds was much more finessed in these early days. They walked within it as in a dream.” This is so cooool! It explains how he knows about lead balloons in the Beginning, but doesn’t seem able to read the future later. Like he’s just become more human over time.
And the descriptions of all these things, coral reefs and even life from Crowley’s perspective, it takes something you’ve heard of before and makes it sound completely new, I love stuff like that :)
This was all really beautifully written! And I love the ‘recognizing the good’ message in the end, too :) Lovely and important to remember, thank you!

Happy Holidays, ngk_is_cool!

no subject

Lovely!

Thank you 🧡💚

no subject